The Pirate Bay May Be Ditching Ads in Favor of JavaScript Monero Mining

One of the world’s largest torrent sites is testing a new way to generate revenue that doesn’t include advertisements. On certain pages accessed on The Pirate Bay, such as search results and categories, the JavaScript for a Monero miner loads silently in the background and uses the site visitor’s spare CPU cycles. The mining script used by The Pirate Bay is called Coinhive, a project which started on a German image board. When The Pirate Bay first rolled out their JavaScript Monero miner they did not notify users, but the site eventually admitted to it in interviews with a file sharing news site and in a blog post on their own site. Users began noticing a large increase in their CPU usage and made posts on sites like Reddit and on The Pirate Bay’s forums. Not all on The Pirate Bay’s team supported the new revenue generating experiment, one administrator and super moderator on The Pirate Bay’s forums posted that he was opposed to the inclusion of the JavaScript Monero miner.

The Pirate Bay is no stranger to cryptocurrencies, in early 2013 the torrent site began accepting Bitcoin donations, just a few months before the site’s 10-year anniversary. However, Bitcoin mining has become so difficult, because it now requires intense processing power, that it is not really practical to mine Bitcoin with a JavaScript mining program. Several JavaScript Bitcoin miners do exist though, including what is perhaps the first JavaScript cryptocurrency miner, jsMiner. While jsMiner hasn’t been updated since 2011, other JavaScript Bitcoin miner scripts continue to be maintained such as Hash Me If You Can. JavaScript Bitcoin miners can utilize a site visitor’s GPUs as well as CPUs, however, the JavaScript Monero miner that The Pirate Bay uses only mines using visitor’s CPUs. Unlike Bitcoin, Monero can be efficiently mined using regular CPUs, and is designed to protect user privacy.

“As you may have noticed we are testing a Monero javascript miner,” the administrators of the Pirate Bay wrote in a blog post on their site. The administrators went on to say in the blog post that they intend to try to kill off all advertising on the site by phasing in the Monero miner, saying, “We really want to get rid of all the ads. But we also need enough money to keep the site running. … Do you want ads or do you want to give away a few of your CPU cycles every time you visit the site?” The Pirate Bay’s JavaScript Monero miner can be stopped using an adblock addon such as uBlock Origin, the NoScript addon, or by disabling JavaScript in the browser. Peter Sunde, the founder of the Pirate Bay, has stated in the past on his blog that he despised the advertisements that the Pirate Bay began to host. The site has in the past been guilty of hosting ads that distributed malware.

According to their blog post, when the Pirate Bay first rolled out their new Monero mining script a “typo” caused the mining script to use the entire CPU of visitors to the site, but this was adjusted so that only 20 to 30 percent of a visitor’s CPU processing power would be used. The Monero mining script is also limited to working in a single browser tab, even if multiple tabs loaded with the site’s mining script are opened. The Pirate Bay told TorrentFreak that the roll out of the JavaScript Monero miner was only a test, and that it would only appear on parts of the site for a “short period”, which they interpreted as only remaining in effect over the weekend. However, nearly a week later the Monero miner script still appears on certain parts of The Pirate Bay site. While some users have complained about the mining script, a large number of users are very supportive of the decision to try to move away from advertisements in favor of implementing cryptocurrency mining to fund the site.

I’d pay for the code behind it! TPB Should sell a licence to use their code so other sites, marketplaces etc can all remove annoying ads in place for an invisible miner which only takes a percentage of the users CPU anyway! It’s a great idea! It would need to proof profitable but certainly I like the idea I’d consider paying if it wasn’t too overly priced. Being a webdeveloper I find it very interesting how mining could literally take over advertising in a sense online!